Oral Evidence: Defence Industrial Policy: Procurement and Prosperity, HC 163
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Defence Committee Oral evidence: Defence Industrial Policy: Procurement and Prosperity, HC 163 Tuesday 12 May 2020 Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 12 May 2020. Watch the meeting Members present: Mr Tobias Ellwood (Chair); Stuart Anderson; Sarah Atherton; Martin Docherty-Hughes; Richard Drax; Mr Mark Francois; Mr Kevan Jones; Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck; Gavin Robinson; John Spellar; Derek Twigg. Questions 1-55 Witnesses I: Professor Trevor Taylor, Professorial Research Fellow in Defence Management, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI); Francis Tusa, Defence journalist; and Sir Mark Poffley KCB OBE, former Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Military Capability) at MoD (2016-18). II: Rt Hon Philip Dunne MP, former Minister for Defence Procurement (2015-16), author of ‘Growing the contribution of defence to UK prosperity’. Written evidence from witnesses: – Professor Trevor Taylor Examination of witnesses Witnesses: Professor Trevor Taylor, Francis Tusa and Sir Mark Poffley. Chair: Welcome to this House of Commons Defence Committee evidence session. This is the first session on the effectiveness of the Department’s approach to procurement and prosperity. We intend to look at the relationship between the MoD and industry, and between policy and implementation, as well as exploring the impact of covid-19 on current procurement programmes. We are pleased to welcome to our first panel Professor Trevor Taylor from RUSI and Francis Tusa, who has worked for a series of broadcasting companies on both sides of the Atlantic and for what looks like a full house of the written press as well, including The Guardian, the FT, The Times and the Military Logistics International periodical, which I think once made a guest appearance on “Have I Got News For You”. I am also pleased to see General Sir Mark Poffley in his place. He recently retired from the MoD, where he was Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Military Capability) from 2016 to 2018. Our first session will last for 90 minutes and involve those three guests. We will then turn to the right hon. Philip Dunne and his report “Growing the contribution of defence to UK prosperity”, which will take the last 30 minutes of the session. Thank you very much indeed to all our guests this afternoon. I am pleased to have you here today. I invite John Spellar to kick us off with our first question. Q1 John Spellar: Can I ask the witnesses, starting with Trevor, whether they think the United Kingdom has a defence industrial strategy and, if so, what is it for? Professor Trevor Taylor: No, I do not think we can say that there is a strategy. As everybody on the Committee is perhaps aware, since 2012 there has been a host of policy statements and there have been some organisational changes. There have been some real programmes established, but whether it all adds up to a strategy—I don’t think we can say that. A strategy involves not only a clear sense of direction, so where you want to be; it also means how you are going to achieve it, and the risks that you are going to take. For instance, I think that we have a contradiction between the statement in 2012 that the ability to use your forces in the way that you see fit is the essence of sovereignty and, then, a basic position for procurement that we would do international competition for many of our needs. Whether international competition gives us the freedom of action is a real question. So I think that there is a very mixed picture. One of the things that needs to be addressed is how the Ministry—and it is the Ministry—plans to reconcile the needs of the services, and integrate the needs of the services, with the very real needs of industry for a range of the right sort of work, so that industry can maintain the capabilities that it needs to have in order to generate top-of-the-range military equipment. Q2 John Spellar: Are some of the problems that you have rightly identified generated from within the Ministry of Defence, or is this substantially created and stimulated by external Treasury rules? Professor Trevor Taylor: I think the Treasury rules as they stand at the minute seem to be pretty permissive, but of course that could disguise the amount of difficulty that the MoD might have in dealing with the Treasury. When you are thinking of the prosperity agenda, in particular, then there is a reference to hard evidence, but of course hard evidence depends on being able to state the counter-factual. In other words, if we didn’t give this contract in this way, what would happen? That access to the counter- factual is always a matter of judgment, so it rather falls short on hard evidence. If you make very optimistic assumptions about how people will be taken into different sorts of employment, it gives you a very different picture. A lot of the issues are generated, nevertheless, within the Ministry of Defence—particularly by financial pressures and temptations to take the lowest price, despite some reference to best value, and so on. So it is not a single pointer, but I think there are issues within the MoD and between the MoD and the Treasury. Q3 John Spellar: What about the Treasury rules that refuse to take into account taxation that would be paid either by companies or by the workforce? Professor Trevor Taylor: I find that a little difficult, because I looked at the Green Book and it talks about the net cost to the Government. Therefore the net cost to the Government obviously should allow you to take into account tax revenues. There is also a reference to accounting rules, so it may be something that is hidden in our commitment to international accounting rules and things like that, rather than simply rules that the Treasury has come up with. However, it has long seemed to me absurd that we cannot calculate the tax revenues. It is not as if the tax revenues are a minor piece. It depends on the particular contract, but they are north of 30% in many cases—even as high as 37%. Francis Tusa: Just apropos of the return from taxation, both for the workers and for companies, I have certainly looked at the Queen Elizabeth carrier programme, and when I do these calculations I cut them in half to avoid over-exaggeration. You can see a reasonable return from taxation, and not indirect, so none of those ones of the corner shop that gets set up; this is just from workforce working on the carrier. The return to Treasury was a minimum of 20% of the cost of the contract. I have looked at other programmes, and it varies between 15% and 25%. To reinforce the fact this is not difficult to do, I frequently see figures from French, Italian and German defence sources, which are able to calculate return to the central Exchequer incredibly easily. I have to say that I think it is a perverse issue with both the Ministry of Defence, which doesn’t want to be, as it feels, constrained in how it procures—they don’t want to collect this data, and the Treasury doesn’t either, because they feel it might perhaps clog up the system. But this data is available. It is calculable and it does show on the vast majority of occasions net returns to whichever Exchequer. Q4 Chair: General, can I ask you, from having worked on the fourth floor, to explain to the uninitiated how procurement operates in the MoD? How do we make sure that we look at indigenous capability versus competition? How do we endeavour to consider whether we are going to make something exportable? Are you able to give an overview from a layman’s perspective of how you approach any challenges in procuring a new asset for the Armed Forces? Sir Mark Poffley: I would make a couple of points. The first initiative really comes from a statement of a requirement—in other words, is there a military capability output that you require?—and then there is a discussion about other factors. Having proved that case, you then need to make a value-for-money judgment. That inevitably goes through committees such as the investment approvals committee, and obviously up to the board and the Defence Secretary. Again, if you come back to the original question about whether this is strategy, there is a real tendency across Government for us to look at this with a financial lens and only a financial lens. If you are asking the question more fundamentally about whether there is a need for a strategy and do we have one, that goes to the heart of whether there is a cross- Government view and a genuine ambition to start to align agendas in various Government Departments towards a particular end. Across Government that has been a struggle over the course of the last 20 years or so. Interestingly—this is a reasonably mature example—Sir John Parker’s work in the national shipbuilding strategy, which wasn’t a national shipbuilding strategy but a national warship-building strategy, essentially looked for a cross-Government consensus about what was in the interests of the yards and the military, and what was likely to further our international agenda. By and large, the document succeeded in that broad aim. How it distils down and whether individual Departments have been able to enact a strategy is a very different question, and I would suggest that the jury is out on that.